​The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

Thursday, February 5, 2026

Showing Up

Word Count:  750

 

Never have I been a big fan of the Olympics, winter or summer, especially since the pretense of amateur athletes was discarded decades ago.  We could add here the silly and indulgent frippery that is the SuperBowl.  Our Circus Maximus.  Money, money, money.  Soccer me says the same about the World Cup.  Nor am I particularly impressed by the gold medal count, this nationalistic strutting.  The one saving grace of the Olympics, and the most rewarding aspect about the games, are those athletes who never win a medal but who compete because they love the game. Given an inverted religious thinking, I consider the losers the real champions, those who nobly compete without expecting to win.  They are the real medalists because they show up.

 

Just show up.  Showing up, like a favorite theologian.  Toyohiko Kagawa, called the Japanese Gandhi, ministered from Kobe to Paris, Yokahama to Princeton, bringing Christian principles to bear upon his nation new to industrialization.  Kagawa, converted by Presbyterian missionaries, ministered in the worst slums of Japan, rife with infanticide, alcoholism, brutality, prostitution.  He helped an old man covered with sores discover dignity.  He loved the rag woman who had to sell her own children.  He fed abandoned babies, most of whom never lived long enough to crawl.  He helped the illiterate begin the road to truest freedom:  to read, to learn.  He fought beside labor unions.  Because he opposed Japan’s war-mongering, he was thrown in jail.  After the war, he helped rebuild Japan.  Like any good pastor, he wept for his people.  He wept because he saw his beloved church too timid to stand tall against the sins of its culture. 

 

Explained Kagawa:  “I read in a book where a man called Christ went about doing good.  It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about.” 

 

Kagawa’s words evidently got into the legs of those 100 pastors arrested In Minneapolis protesting our corrupt Administration‘s abusive actions.  So proud of them.  They showed up.  Will we?

 

There is a plaque at Princeton Seminary honoring a man who showed up.  It honors the ministry of James Reeb, beaten to death in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 by segregationists wielding clubs who hated this pastor’s effort to join the protests fighting against the suppression of African-American voting rights.  Delivering Reeb’s eulogy, Martin Luther King, Jr., called him ‘‘a shining example of manhood at its best.”  The last shall be first. The first shall be last.

 

Then there are the Four Chaplains who showed up as champions on February 3, 1943. The U.S. Dorchester, an army transport ship, was crowded to capacity, carrying 902 service men, merchant seamen and civilian workers, plus four chaplains:  a Methodist, Dutch Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Jewish.  A Nazi U-Boat torpedoed it below the water line.  The order was given to abandon ship.  Pandemonium ensued.  The four chaplains tried to bring order to the chaos, tending to the wounded and dying.  There were too few life jackets for them to distribute.  The chaplains removed theirs and gave them to young desperate sailors.  History records:  “As the ship went down, survivors in nearby rafts could see the four chaplains -- arms linked and braced against the slanting deck. Their voices could also be heard offering prayers.”  February 3. 
 

When I first came to serve in Danville, I was intimidated by the talents of my congregation, particularly because so many worked at Geisinger.  I confessed this to a church elder, who laughed.  Neonatologist Bob said to me:  “We may know a lot about medicine, but that doesn’t mean we know how to live faithful lives.”  His comment redirected my pastoral approach.  More than having the people serve the church, how could the church serve them?  How could we equip them by learning together to apply their faithful vocation through their daily occupations, whether as surgeon, physician, nurse, janitor, contractor, homemaker, teacher, barber?  They deserved more than pep rally worship failing to challenge personal regeneration.  They deserved more than a glib religious institution.  Missionary D. T. Niles quipped:  people gathered to hear a sermon and sip coffee afterwards doesn’t make it a church.  In the Christian church, baptism means ordination to costly ministry.  Do you go to church or from church?  In other words, faith at work.  Showing up where and when it counts.

 

Driving to preach above Benton, I’d pass a barn bearing the sign:  “In God we trust.”  How nice.  Far more interesting is:  Can God trust in us?